Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

But ordinarily such a definition, like the philologist's, is pure lexicography, affirming a relationship of synonymy antecedent to the exposition in hand.

In effect it included the whole language of pure mathematics.

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.

A clear example is pure word deafness, in which a neurological patient has lost the ability to analyze speech while recognizing other environmental sounds (Hickok & Poeppel, 2000; Poeppel, 2001).

Quine (1960) wrote: The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience (p. 42).

The only difference between them and those maxims, which are vulgarly esteemed the result of pure experience, is, that the former cannot be established without some process of thought, and some reflection on what we have observed, in order to distinguish its circumstances, and trace its consequences: Whereas in the latter, the experienced event is exactly and fully familiar to that which we infer as the result of any particular situation.

According to the principle, therefore, which denies necessity, and consequently causes, a man is as pure and untainted, after having committed the most horrid crime, as at the first moment of his birth, nor is his character anywise concerned in his actions, since they are not derived from it, and the wickedness of the one can never be used as a proof of the depravity of the other.

Contrary to Hume, we believe, just as did Kant, that a “pure” science of innate forms of human thought, independent of all experience, is possible.

Kant's contention that the pure consciousness of moral law can be a factor in bringing about conduct in conformity with law, becomes the above conception of rule-regulated behavior.

She already had one concept of that property, before leaving her room, and after she was presented with the red star, she had two concepts, without knowing that they were concepts of the same property The second concept Mary acquired was a pure phenomenal concept.